Clackamas Chinook Performance Art: Verse Form Interpretations by Victoria Howard (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Clackamas Chinook Performance Art: Verse Form Interpretations by Victoria Howard David G. Lewis (bio) Clackamas Chinook Performance Art: Verse Form Interpretations by Victoria Howard, transcription by Melville Jacobs, edited by Catharine Mason University of Nebraska Press, 2021 TRIBAL SCHOLARS SEEKING TO study and recover their language today require a significant knowledge of anthropology and linguistics. Anthropologists and other scholars in the earliest years of tribal studies did not make this task easy, depositing research records in exclusive archives in faraway places that are nearly unreachable by tribal people. In addition, anthropological notation was and is quite difficult to decipher. Today, researchers work to make early anthropological research available to tribal and other scholars, which aids numerous projects to revive, restore, and recover tribal languages. Clackamas Chinook Performance Art, produced by Catharine Mason, fits within this more progressive latter philosophy. Mason has deftly produced an approachable text of Clackamas Chinook oral histories that makes sense of the complex linguistics of the original Melville Jacobs notations. Melville Jacobs, an anthropologist with the University of Washington, had a notable career working with tribes in Oregon and finding key speakers of the remaining tribal languages to help collect and decipher thousands of pages of oral histories. The Jacobs Collection was kept by the university for almost fifty years, however, allowing only privileged access, which did not at all help tribes or tribal scholars. Mason and her many contemporaries have now accessed the collection and are producing accessible texts that tribal communities can easily access. The first similar project in recent memory was Henry Zenk's My Life by Louis Kenoyer: Reminiscences of a Grand Ronde Reservation Childhood (2017). In this work, Zenk and Jedd Schrock translated thousands of untranslated pages of Tualatin Kalapuyan oral histories and produced a text of the life story of Kenoyer. Mason similarly has reinterpreted numerous Clackamas oral histories previously translated by Jacobs in Clackamas Chinook Texts and other manuscripts, a corpus that was reanalyzed by Dell Hymes and other scholars. Mason listened to descendants of Victoria Howard and to the wishes of the Grand Ronde Tribe and did not include myth texts, which were of a sensitive nature, rather focusing on mainly oral histories of more recent events. The rule that Mason chose to follow is in response to generations of critiques [End Page 142] by tribes that their most sensitive oral histories have been collected, misinterpreted, and misused by generations of scholars. Many scholars working on oral histories did not listen to or ask tribes about the meaning of their oral histories and created their own interpretations. They did so at a time when tribes were working to recover from debilitating American colonization and assimilation agendas. In this early period, few tribal scholars had a chance to work to recover their oral histories, and yet interpretations were being produced regardless. But as Mason points out, scholars must work with tribes to understand oral histories because tribes understand their culture most completely, and such studies will aid Tribes and Native scholars who are working on cultural recovery. Mason's interpretative framework follows that of her college mentor, Dell Hymes. Hymes practiced verse form patterning, suggesting that oral histories produced by a master storyteller are a true literary art form. Mason identifies Victoria Howard as a master storyteller and notes that Howard voiced the texts in a true artistic literary style through performance and was able to deftly adapt her style to the needs of Jacobs when eliciting the texts. Mason notes that Hymes identified the grouping of the text units in threes and fives, suggesting again a truly unique Native literary presentation style that may be present in other texts not yet studied. Most of the texts—some twenty-six oral histories—appear with little critical analysis, besides short introductions. The style presented is clean and easy to read with line numbering. Both the Clackamas Chinook, mixed with occasional Chinuk Wawa words, and an English translation are presented for each story. For Clackamas learners the format of presentation may limit learning because each oral history is presented in uninterrupted fashion over several pages. A preferable format would be with Clackamas on the recto page and English on...